Now I Am Here

“The world is material. We are always in a certain place. Now I am here.” - Autumn, Karl Ove Knausgaard

As a Social Studies teacher, a wide variety of courses get thrown your way - geography, sociology, law, psychology, history, economics - it depends on the school and course offerings, but most of the 'soft sciences' end up being something one might encounter along a career in the profession. In my 6th year of teaching, I took on human geography; the intersection of human culture and development with geography. The course itself is a distillation of social studies in a way - covering everything from linguistic development to demographics to agricultural systems.The cultural landscape is something I had never really considered deeply, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense and ultimately became one of my favorite classes to teach. Something that struck me most when beginning to study the subject in order to teach it was the influence of place on linguistic development. The native peoples of the Arctic Circle civilizations have many words for winter conditions that speak to not only what's coming out of the sky, but the conditions on the ground and whether or not said conditions are conducive to walking about. The perceptive abilities of humans will never be fully translate-able into verbal expression, but necessity can lead to amazing feats of human creation. 

Thinking about the interplay of humans and their environments, I hold an affinity toward extreme landscapes and often, those who come from them (or at least, the art they produce while in them). When the land itself is not welcoming to person or a people, it does something to their understanding of the world. So many Americans live in prefabricated neighborhoods and are entirely engulfed by the man-made as to never have to encounter the frightening vastness Earth has to offer. Since high school, I've personally wanted to see the Mojave Desert. The starkness of the desert biome has been likened to an extraterrestrial one many times; perhaps that's a deeply anthropocentric view. We did not create such vacancy; in fact, such traits are anathema to a social primate's instinctual desire for proximity and comfort, but that does not mean such landscapes do not belong here. Standing alone in a desert (hot or cold) surrounded for miles by emptiness would send anyone into an existential crisis after a while. Hell, it'd even make people want to live in Las Vegas just to avoid the uncomfortable nothingness. Humans are not so different from the  rhesus monkeys in Harlow's infamous psychology experiments. Primates, and likely many other animals, would give up actual nourishment for psychological comfort and security. Of course this might be a stretch of an analogy, but there is a degree of truth to why so many of us choose to live in less than ideal surroundings in exchange for the access to convenience of modern living, for the comfort of conformity with other members of our species.

For those who know me and have heard me fangirl over the epigraph's author, Karl Ove Knausgaard, you may also be aware that Norway is one of those places that calls to me. The extreme landscape has not only produced one of my all-time favorite writers, but also some of my favorite musicians. There is a conservative, Lutheran culture in Norway that I would venture to guess all of these artists have chafed against to produce their craft, a point that could be dissected in and of itself at length. What links the expressions that come from this environment is their reverence for the physical world that surrounds them. Even within the intense focus on his own mind for Knausgaard's six volume "autobiographical" novel,his writing has an expansiveness to it. Here we are, mining the depths of the mind of a middle aged man, and somehow we're faced with the unity of all of our own consciousnesses. Whether we want to admit it or not, we've all secretly scowled through meetings or cursed our friends or resented the existence of our most cherished. That internal struggle to be outwardly compassionate and inwardly curmudgeonly is not reserved for his experience. And although his work is not some sort of revelation in the sense that it's exactly saying something new, it does break through the confines of what we are supposed to publicly admit and feel about those whom with we share our lives.  

I've also been reading David Wojnarowicz's In the Shadow of the American Dream, which is a collection of his diaries from his teens through his fame and ultimate death from AIDS. There's something about the America he describes that reminds me of now; a brokenness or failure of culture that marginalizes those who do not fit in. The definition of who doesn't fit in is always shifting -that's the game. Sometimes marginalized groups are brought into the fold and a new "other" appears. Whomever the other is, however, within that marginalization there is a sort of freedom to create and be who you are. Although, on the other side, being persecuted for the exact same reasons comes along with those spaces. In final diaries, he's dying of AIDS-related complications, feeling as though his body has betrayed him but also that others have as well by continuing to live their mundane lives while he's thrust into the existential crisis of death. Living through a virus-caused pandemic right now, it's chilling to think about all of the parallels to the continued horrors of not knowing what the virus will do to a human host - Kaposi's sarcoma in young men? Blood clots that kill? We've lived this before. But death remains the ultimate "othering" - we shunt the dead and dying off into margins of our minds, even when they're the ones we love. The vastness of death is that existential desert we just can't bear to look at. 

Early into this pandemic, there was a moment where Americans really did seem to be at the precipice of an awakening to being more accepting of the unknown. People were spending more time outside, driving less, consuming less. As the pandemic has worn on and become more and more a politicized weapon, whatever desire for change has faded not because people care less but because they are made to suppress their desire for revolution. The pull of modern life plays on our desire for comfort and provides emotional shelter from mortality. Constant talk about returning to life as we knew it forms a sort of nostalgia for the old (even if it only mere months ago). Covid deaths continue to climb; we tend to understand the threat less and less, as the numbers become more and more abstract the higher they go. Similarly, the environmental crisis that looms in our near future has also kept us from dealing directly with the problem. The problem is our way of life. We must change, not the environment. We are part of the environment and must remember all of the times it has humbled us - even if one hasn't ever seen a town laid to waste by a tornado or hurricane, maybe a beautiful sunset gave pause, or a giant clap of thunder rattled one's brain. 

Sojourning through a desert for years on end in search of answers isn't a reasonable expectation for most to have. However, opening one's self to accept the existential expanse that is all around us is feasible even within the confines of a suburban hellscape. 

Musical Epilogue:
 
Although they're not Norwegian, American greats Mastodon have encapsulated this vastness perfectly in the song below....

Down In It.

I've read some writers that breathe a degree of humanness like no other. No sweeping descriptions of crinoline skirts or horses or tempestuous storms - there's just subconscious nitty-gritty laid bare on the page. Even if you don't empathize with their characters, you somehow do because you're also a human. Psychological horror may be one way to describe it, and if we're being honest, we've all done that to ourselves at some point - gripped by a very real sense of fear for the irrational reason of we decided to freak ourselves out. But every author doesn't have to be Kafka to expose their audience to what it feels like to be human and, additionally, being such doesn't have to be so frightening (though it can be).

Karl Ove Knausgaard's series of books, My Struggle, as all six are titled, have reawakened my need to acknowledge that those feelings of humanness exist. We all feel uncontrollable desires and nasty thoughts - some of us choose not only to admit that to ourselves, but to others. In the second volume, Knausgaard has an entire passage analyzing Dostoevsky in which he states he feels "uncomfortable" in Dostoevsky's world. Perhaps, as an author, he views this analysis somewhat ironically, since his prose likely makes many readers uncomfortable. But he's right - in both writers' worlds, there's an "uncanny valley" aspect. A very human text describes someone's inner thoughts in a non-polished, non-John Greene sort of way. This is not a milieu where two teens, dying of cancer,  engage in repartee that conveys they have all the time in the world. This is not the type of stylized speak of Joss Whedon's worlds (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly) or of most television dramas.

In contrast, Knausgaard fleshes out the inner monologue you have running through your mind all day - the impassive thought you have on the check-out line at the supermarket, "Oh man, is that person ugly/fat/lazy/old." Thoughts your very well-mannered superego filter would never let you say aloud, but that still exist inside. And these thoughts aren't necessarily judgments, most are simple observations, categorizational attempts at making sense of the world around you. Though somehow, they can seem so taboo when revealed. Writers who touch on something uncomfortably human through their words are difficult to get through - think Nabokov's Lolita. Many have speculated that Nabokov himself had a predilection for underage girls to be able to get into the mind of his narrator, Humbert Humbert though, perhaps, his fictional explication reveals more about the interpreter than the author.

There's a rawness, a plainness, to a text that's not heavily stylized (or at least one comes off as such). It's not that other writers don't hit on very human emotions or empathetic experiences- the key is that the style of the text is pertinent. Yet, some people find this sort of writing overwhelming and more neurosis-inducing than anything else. Or as being as much of a distraction as any other form of art - clouding the mind from focusing on letting go or transcending to a higher plane of consciousness.

While I can see these opinions holding some weight, personally, I find such works cathartic. I am reminded that my own "flaws" tie me back into the one-ness of everything. There is no perfection to be attained because there is no standard. We all experience ups and downs, loves and losses, and ultimately, the same end -death. Yet in the interim, we're consumed by our thoughts, most of which signify nothing. They're exercises of our consciousness and even if we are master meditators who can make our thoughts sail away like clouds, new ones always form, and must be pushed aside again and again. The only clarity that we'll ever achieve is trying to understand ourselves, acknowledge what we find excitable, deplorable, indispensable, etc.

And thusly, a truly human text may just drag you down into the muck of being alive, and that, to me, is something we should never avoid facing.